Nouns, opinions and descriptions with a PSHE/RSE twist

I first got to know the work of Elise Gravel when I came across Monstres en vrac in Montréal ten years ago.  When I was in California last week, I popped into a branch of Barnes & Noble to have a look at their Spanish section.  Considering how bilingual California is, it was a smaller section than I expected.  I purchased one book: El rosa, el azul y tú by Elise Gravel.  It's also available in French as Le rose, le bleu et toi !

The book offers us opportunities to discuss self, relationships and gender stereotypes with children, while also covering areas of language such as nouns and their gender, opinions, and adjectives and adjectival agreement.

For examples, here are some nouns which we could show to children without the images.  They could investigate the phonics and use their dictionaries to find the meanings.  They could also work out the grammatical gender of each noun.  Then, as is suggested at the top of the page, we could ask the children to sort them into "Things for girls", "Things for boys" and "Things for everyone".  The resulting discussions will have strong links to the PSHE/RSE curricula.

Another example is opinions, which can be approached as a true/false activity as suggested on the page.

Elise Gravel also offers some free posters on her website.  Among them there are two useful Spanish ones:

They show examples in practice of adjectival agreement and could be a starting point for discussions about gender stereotypes.

This book and these resources give an interesting twist to commonly taught grammar, and would give Key Stage 3 teachers a way of doing the usual in an unusual way for their new Year 7 students who have different experiences of language learning.

I would recommend speaking to your headteacher and/or PSHE coordinator before using these ideas in your lessons.

Redondo y Cuadrado

 

When I taught Key Stage 2 French, my favourite way of introducing and practising grammatical gender was using the book un triangle by Néjib.  You can read about the book and what I did with it here.

With my Year 5s I've just started Unit 13 of my scheme of work for Key Stage 2 Spanish, which is all about description.

We started off by reading the poem Redondo (Round) by Gloria Fuertes, and talking about why the adjective is spelled in three different ways.

Then I showed the class the Spanish words for ten more round things.  We gave out the Spanish dictionaries, and the children worked in pairs to look up the new words, find out if they were masculine or feminine, and decide whether we would need redondo or redonda to describe them.

We put the answers in the form of a new poem inspired by the one by Gloria Fuertes.

While we were working on this activity, I had an idea inspired by un triangle and its family of books.  The next week, I introduced the class to the adjective cuadrado, which they had first met in Year 2.

I gave them the challenge of finding in the dictionary the Spanish words for things that are square and putting them into a line of poetry following the example above, and working out whether they would need the masculine or feminine form of the adjective.  The children worked in pairs on their poems and used this guide to help them.  I also showed them the book un carré by Néjib, to show them how the thing didn't have to be something square exactly, but something that had a square as a part of it.

There is also a column for a small picture, so that they could justify why they had chosen a certain word, and show me how it was square.  

The following week the children copied up and illustrated their excellent poems, and I now have the difficult task of working out which ones to put forward for the next issue of Write Away! next month.  Here's one of them as an example of the poems the children created.

 

The resources will be on Light Bulb Languages soon.

Crowd-sourcing model texts for French

Following the success of the Spanish crowd-source and resulting resource, I'm now crowd-sourcing for French.

I would be very grateful if you could write a sentence or couple of sentences using the highlighted language that you can see at the top of this post.  You can see my example to start you off.  Don't worry about colour highlighting, as I can do that.  If you don't want to add your real name, a pseudonym or nickname would be fine.

You can add your sentences here in a comment, or email them to me.

Merci!  I will, of course, share any resulting resources.

A crowd-source resource

On Monday I posted about creating model texts for colleagues to use in their lessons.  I invited blog readers to contribute a text for inclusion in the resource to be used with beginner learners of Spanish who are learning about grammatical gender for the first time.

You can see an image of the contributed texts above, and you can download the resource here.

I introduced my two beginner Year 4 classes to the texts today.  I gave them each a glossary of the 36 nouns that are used in the texts.  Then I gave them a copy of the texts between two, and asked them to work in pairs to find the genders of each noun.  They did really well finding them, using the colours as well as everything they knew about indefinite articles and final -o and -a to help them.

I'm aiming for the children to write their own texts, ultimately.  Next I'm going to get them to help me to write what is in my teacher apron, starting with just a list then adding the starters, conjunctions and so on. When they start writing their own I might let them have an additional glossary for some funny vocabulary.  I might also get them to underline words in the colours or even write the words in colours, as suggested by Vincent Everett.

If there are any resources that you think would be useful in this format, please mention it in the comments.  Spanish or French both fine!

Crowd-sourcing model texts

I was very interested in this tweet when I saw it at lunchtime yesterday. It's from Samara Spielberg, who is a Spanish teacher in the US. She asks colleagues to write short texts which incorporate certain set phrases, verbs and structures. Then her students read and analyse them before using them as a model for their own work. 

by Samara Spielberg

I think this is a model we could adapt for Key Stage 2. It would be quite straightforward to provide each other with multiple model texts in this way. 

To get the ball rolling I'm going to try it out for gender in Spanish, something that I have just begun with my Year 4 new starters.

I would be very grateful if you could write a sentence or couple of sentences using the highlighted language that you can see at the top of this post.  You can see my example to start you off.  Don't worry about colour highlighting, as I can do that.  If you don't want to add your real name, a pseudonym or nickname would be fine.

You can add your sentences here in a comment, or email them to me.

I'll be seeing Year 4 on Thursday 7th, so any received before then will be most welcome!

¡Muchas gracias!  I will, of course, share any resulting resources.

What's in the box? pt.2

A few years ago I wrote What's in the box?, a post with some ideas for using empty or not-empty boxes to stimulate language work.  Today I actually tried it out!!

I've been working on gender of nouns (animals in particular) with my new Y6 Spaniards, moving on to description of these singular nouns using adjectives of colour.  I wanted them to have a go at some descriptions on whiteboards before writing anything formally in their books.  I set up these PowerPoint slides, which show an empty cardboard box.  I asked the children to decide which animal was in the box and which colour it was.  They had to write their description on their whiteboard and hold it up for me to see.  Then I clicked the slide to reveal what was in fact in the box. 

Doing five of these meant that I could spot common errors such as putting the adjective in the wrong place, putting the wrong article, not agreeing the adjectives and so on.  All the children became more confident and faster with their writing the more we did.  It also turned out to be immensely motivating, especially for the boys.  They all seemed to enjoy putting daft colours with the animal words.

Flowcharts

Apart from two rainy interludes, yesterday was warm and windy - excellent drying weather.  While I was pegging out another load of washing, I had the idea that some grammatical points can be explained and facilitated using flowcharts.  I sketched some out last night, and today had a go at making them.

I wanted to use an app, but couldn't find one that I liked and that worked well on my tablet.  If you know of a good Android flowchart app, please let me know in the comments!

I consulted with my engineer husband, who I knew had recently put together a complex flowchart as instructions for an electronic archery gadget he made.  He told me about the meanings of the differently-shaped boxes and arrows, and said that Publisher was a good tool.  That was OK, as I make most of my resources using Publisher.  It was the first time, though, that I have used the flowchart Autoshapes for their proper purpose!

These two were relatively simple to put together.  There are things like Ser and Estar, and Por and Para that I could do as well, but they would be much more complex!

I also discovered this afternoon that flowcharts are part of the programming component of the KS2 Computing curriculum.  Flowcharts, therefore, are another opportunity for some cross-curricular learning.  Children could demonstrate their understanding of concepts or groups of vocabulary by devising a flowchart for their classmates to test out and debug.

What do you think?  Do you think flowcharts would be a useful tool in the languages classroom?

Un triangle, un carré et un rond

I thought I would share with you a series of lessons that I am just completing.  I have designed them to introduce the children to the dictionaries, and, just as importantly, to introduce them to the concept of nouns and gender.  All these, of course, are things specified by the new Programme of Study.

It all started when I found the book un triangle by Néjib in Montréal last summer.  I mentioned the idea that I had for it in a previous blogpost.

We began by learning the names in French of ten classroom objects, and also did some activities to highlight some of the phonemes in those words.  (You can find the resources here.)  Then we found out what gender is all about in French, and how we can spot it when we meet a new word (resources).  Next I showed them our new French dictionaries, and we did a series of short worksheets to help us to get used to using the dictionaries (resources).

Next, we read un triangle for the first time.  We talked about what the word on each page meant, and looked for the cut-out triangle in each picture.  We also worked out if each word was masculine or feminine, and the children told me how they knew the words' genders.  We also looked at the colours that Néjib uses - only blue, red, yellow and white.

I showed the children pictures of the other two books that Néjib has written in the same series. They are called un carré and un rond.  We talked about what we might expect to see inside them.

I issued the children with the challenge of making their own version of un carré.  Because we were going to use folded minibooks, they would have to think of seven things which are square or which have squares as part of them.  They would have to list the words in their exercise books and then use the dictionaries to find out how to say the words in French.  Very importantly, they would also have to make a note of whether the word was masculine or feminine.

What came next was lots of hard thinking about square things!  One of the (solid gold) Year 4 TAs said she thought it was a good activity as it was really making them think hard as well as be creative.  If somebody was really stuck, I showed them how they could open up the dictionary at a random page and look at all the words there to see if any would suit.  We found some unexpected words this way.

Once the children had their list of seven words, I checked them, and they made their minibooks.  On the front cover they wrote the title un carré.  Then on each of the seven pages they drew a picture of their "square word" and wrote the French word, preceded by un or une as appropriate.  This is why they needed to know the gender of the word.  They enjoyed colouring their pictures using only blue, red, yellow and white.  The camion at the top of this post is one of my examples, and here are some sample pages from Year 4:

Those who have finished asked if they could start a book for un rond.  And they are determined to do their own un triangle after that.  I have now purchased un carré and un rond as well, and I'll show them to the children when they have finished their own books.  I think a lot of the children have had better ideas than Néjib, so it'll be interesting to see what they think!